Malak Mansour

Rebranding Patriarchy: The Divine Feminine

mepi-tls Issue 4 , , 0 Comment
Rebranding Patriarchy: The Divine Feminine
By Malak Mansour – Senior Editor

Internet trends that originate from and are propagated by social media have always been an indicator of the current cultural zeitgeist. To analyze and critique these trends, it’s critical to understand that dismissing such internet phenomena as simply trends that rise and fall can be reductionist. Trends mostly related to aesthetics eventually coincide with and mold the consumer’s identity. As such, consumerist culture leads to the conflation of what we want with who we are, or at least, whom we should strive to be. With every post, trend, or overnight ‘micro-celebrity’, one wonders how our online behavior is going to reflect in our offline social interactions. One way we can visualize this manifestation is through the field of aesthetics, especially when it comes to those who identify as women or have been socialized as one. Aesthetics have never been constant throughout eras and the platonic ideal of what is beautiful is quite turbulent. Aesthetics are propagated throughout younger generations by selling the idea of individualism and uniqueness. It is the idea that everyone is living unique, independent, and never-seen-before lives, which might sound appealing at first sight but is false, and to take it a step further, alienating.

Women online have seen it all: clean girl aesthetic, cottage-core, dark feminine energy, e-girl aesthetic, it-girl aesthetic, trad wives, light or dark academia aesthetic, and more oddly specific derivatives of femininity that are niche enough to grant a false sense of individuality and differentiation. Maybe you are in your Fleabag era or in your manic pixie dream girl era, whichever you feel like you relate to the most for the month. However, these aesthetics are not restricted to what you wear or how you present yourself but extend deeper into your lifestyle, emotions, and thoughts. Nuance and complex personhood are reduced to identity labels that are mass-produced via viral trends, so you are another Type of Girl. One interesting manifestation of this internet phenomenon is the Divine Feminine aesthetic; a vaguely feminist way (at best) of reclaiming traditional femininity but in a cool girlboss-it’s-my-choice way, not in a misogynistic and patriarchal way, of course.

The divine feminine is the feminine counterpart to the traditional patriarchal figure. The person who embodies the divine feminine is in touch with their femininity or ‘inner goddess’, which is to say that there’s a spiritual aspect to it as well. The aesthetic encourages being in touch with nature and routinely practicing self-care. On the surface, these preaches are quite helpful; there can’t be downsides to taking care of yourself. While this is true, it takes a few minutes of watching ‘how to tap into your divine femininity’ videos to realize that the philosophy of the aesthetic is simply re-packaged gender roles. When you are nurturing, giving, and receiving love and affection, and being understanding you are radiating feminine energy, and when you’re being productive, chasing goals, and being assertive then you are tapping into your masculine energy. But the divine feminine is not just adopting certain behaviors or principles, it can also be largely consumerist because it is based on aspirational beauty, which can never be fully attainable. It heavily relies on how you present yourself aesthetically i.e., what is considered beautiful. Not shockingly, the idea of beauty is parallel if not congruent to what traditional feminine beauty is: no wrinkles, clear skin, hourglass figure, voluminous hair, and so on. Below is a collage of some screenshots from TikTok videos that include #feminine, #feminineenergy, or #divinefeminine as hashtags. The videos allude to womanly hygiene (which includes manicures and shaping eyebrows), being a high-value woman, how to prevent smile lines, wrinkles, crow’s feet, and other natural signs of aging or having a different body type.

 

For feminist activists that have been involved in the movement for a while, especially during the early 2010s, all the strides that have been taken to challenge and deconstruct such beauty standards and ideals of femininity have been revoked, which can be exhausting and tiring to see. The aesthetics of the divine feminine have been preached and encouraged for decades, especially regarding the fact that the standards remain Eurocentric! Moreover, if we were to deconstruct it from a class point of view, much of what is practiced can be financially inaccessible. Maintenance of feminine beauty is costly, and the heads of beauty corporations will be proponents and advocates for such movements if it means more supply and thus, more profit.

At the fundamentals of such trends, we keep going back to the same concept: an obsession with beauty. Adopting archetypes and aesthetics signifies an inability to exist outside of performance, and we end up handicapped by how we are perceived, what other people think of us, and what we hope to embody. We commodify ourselves to appeal to the constant surveillance of beauty and to a perceived audience. What is really required of us is to engage mindfully, actively, and critically with what we choose to consume. Choosing to express a curated aesthetic is really a personal choice, and it can be a fun one as well. But allowing trends to consume us and affect our self-esteem is dangerous because if there’s one thing the internet has taught us, it is that trends are ephemeral, but can greatly affect our identities. Engaging in aesthetics and beauty is not only inevitable but also natural. We connect with and are attracted to what we think is beautiful because it’s indulgent and surrounds us naturally. The problem becomes attributing beauty with morality i.e., what is good and bad. Aesthetic trends seem motivating because they are what drive us to take care of ourselves and to feel better, but they are detrimental in the long run because we never will attain them given that we are complex individuals, and not a carefully curated Pinterest board of idealized images.

 

References:

  1. ‘Our Obsession with Beauty is Dystopian’ https://youtu.be/55MshtmGsP0
  2. ‘Social Media’s Obsession with Aesthetics and Curated Identities’ https://youtu.be/31NDzvFtNnI
  3. ‘Gender Performativity and the Surveillance of Womanhood’ https://youtu.be/clt3Nj6dHwk
  4. ‘Being a queen is your birthright’ https://youtu.be/t9506JGYNDs

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

On Gender-Based Cyber Sexual Violence

mepi-tls Issue 3 , 0 Comment
On Gender-Based Cyber Sexual Violence
By Malak Mansour

Amidst the rise and ­­ever-growing development of all derivatives of artificial intelligence, it truly seems as if everything is within a laptop’s reach. Powerful AI tools can write essays, code in multiple languages, and compute complex mathematical tasks amongst other day-to-day tasks. However, that entails that AI is powerful and convoluted enough so that it generates artificial videos and images of virtually anyone if fed enough, and seemingly little, data. While bleak to admit, women received the shorter end of the stick, once again. It didn’t take long for people to create scarily accurate deepfakes of women in pornographic contexts, whether as revenge porn or in an attempt to cater to a fantasy of any woman a person desires. It may seem that creating such content would be reserved for the highly technologically literate with any sort of malicious intent. However, the existence of powerful AI tools renders this task quite accessible and relatively easy to anyone with basic computer skills. The emergence of more AI tools that manipulate and generate visual content seems to be the starting ground for more ways to violate women.

In an article by The Washington Post published around two weeks ago, it was mentioned that Hany Farid, digital images analyst and professor at the University of California Berkeley explained, “since these models learn what to do by ingesting billions of images from the internet, they can reflect societal biases, sexualizing images of women by default.” The author, Tatum Hunter, then provides the example of Lauren Gutierrez, a 29-year-old from Los Angeles who fed the app Lensa, which generates AI portraits, publicly available photos of herself, such as her LinkedIn profile picture, after which Lensa returned naked images. This can be attributed to the fact that the training that these algorithms go through include a lot of pornographic content available online, which, in turn, can easily return nsfw (not necessarily just nude) content wi­thout being specifically asked.

Some might argue that the main targets of such content would be celebrities, but as we have seen, it can really be applied to any woman who has a social media presence. It goes without saying that the non-consensual generation and propagation of such content is also sexual harassment or violence. This sort of violence can be even more threatening since the perpetrator can maintain complete anonymity, so the victim does not only have fabricated videos of herself readily available online, but she also does not know the source. This creates a different power structure which exerts power and control over a victim from behind a screen and a stable Wi-Fi connection. In an article published at MIT Tech Review, author Karen Hao shares the story of Helen Mort, a UK based poet and broadcaster, who was subjected to a fake pornography campaign. “It really makes you feel powerless, like you’re being put in your place,” she [Mort] says. “Punished for being a woman with a public voice of any kind. That’s the best way I can describe it. It’s saying, ‘Look: we can always do this to you.’”

The offense does not only end with the release of the videos but can also extend to the professional lives of these women. Women can and have lost jobs and struggle with finding employment. Image-based sexual abuse is a gendered security issue. The concern with deepfakes is not limited to political campaigns, which was the initial reason people were alarmed, but it also extends to the personal livelihoods of many women. There exist many communities online that perpetuate such forms of media without much surveillance or regulation thus far, namely Reddit. For example, Reddit was the hub of a now banned subreddit dedicated to creating pornographic celebrity deep fakes. The problem may seem constricted to a “few ” hundred redditors, but an analysis conducted in 2019 by the cybersecurity company Deeptrace found that 96% of all deep fakes online are pornographic and disproportionately female. This sort of statistic is alarming, to say the least.

It is important to note that there are many legislative and social efforts to combat deep fakes that target and victimize women. Software to detect and recognize pornographic deep fakes are being developed and fine-tuned, but the battle of the AIs remains to this day as both kinds of software keep getting more powerful and nuanced. The grave reality remains true that our use of technology has always been gendered, so while it is important to celebrate revolutionary creations and developments, we must stay vigilant and wary of how it is being utilized without turning a blind eye.